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AnandTech has some insight into Seagate’s new 2.5″ drive lineup, with sizes up to 5 TB.

The BarraCuda 2.5”/15 mm drives for external storage solutions will be used inside Seagate’s own DAS devices such as the Backup Plus Portable Drive and the Expansion Portable Hard Drive products. The Seagate Backup Plus Plus Portable Drive 5 TB (STDR5000100) is due in early November and will cost around $150 – $160.

At this point, I had a couple of options. I could spend more money on a better, faster NAS, one that wouldn’t disappoint me with its performance. Or… I could go ahead and build my own, which would give me the flexibility to build basically whatever box I wanted. Inspired by our recent articles on building a living room gaming PC and a DIY router, I decided to take the more Ars option.

The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating four different hard drives targeting the NAS market:

Western Digital today released a 4 TB 3.5″ Red NAS drive, along with expanding the Red line to include 2.5 inch drives in 750 GB and 1 TB configurations. Storage Review has already published benchmarks for the 4 TB drive and the 1 TB 2.5″ drive.

Western Digital released a hard drive aimed directly at home NAS users. It should also work great for home file servers, and any server where a 5400 RPM SATA drive is appropriate.

WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).

AnandTech takes the brand new 3.0 TB Western Digital internal hard drives for a spin.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.